Seriously, AC here deserves upvotes. Sadly I have none. But parent deftly illustrates why the difficulty of getting valid scientific results in the social sciences in no way proves that it's categorically impossible; I suppose though some people would rather write things off as impossible when they can't get quick, easy results, which says far more about the people being so dismissive than the nature of such intellectual endeavours.
I would expand on it like so: personal attacks in an argument are the large refuge of the incompetent because that is the extent of violence they are willing to involve themselves in.
So your response to someone who you feel has personally attacked you is to claim that he's incompetent because only the incompetent would make personal attacks? I hate to break it to you, but that's a personal attack, and you've kindof argued yourself out of the argument here.
I think that says more about crappy college poetry than the state of computer AI...
"You wound me, sir!" the AI cried,
"For student I am not.
In terms of prose and poetry
More than you've learned, have I forgot.
Yet you compare me to the fools
Whose minds through college rot?
The only insult worse would be
An editor of Slashdot."
As Apple pulls further and further away from the once-cozy relationship they had with Google, what makes you think they'll fail to mirror Google's own business models and ventures? Then all that data they've been collecting will be, retroactively, just as loaded as what Google has on you.
Sounds like the problem is your company. Taking it out on random Slashdot commenters may give you a moment of catharsis, and there may be fancy, elaborate and kindof-barely-working solutions to your stated problem, but neither will solve the actual underlying problem.
Actually, a lot of decent federal programs and decisions have come from minority governments, and those are really only possible in a system with more than two parties. So I wouldn't actually say nothing changes in such an event.
A single data point doesn't turn an irrational fear into a rational, respectable one. We can still demand more sense and an actual understanding of the risks from the authorities, instead of a fear or public panic based one. As many have pointed out, more people die on average per hour from vehicular accidents in America than have died from terrorism since 2001-09-11. I know we aren't ever going to get a proportional response to such things from authorities, media, or the public, but is being at most within a few orders of magnitude really too much to ask?
From looking at the picture in TFA, it looks like the pinhole camera was duct-taped to the remains of a light pole on the bridge. You can make out an old baseplate, and the 3/4 inch steel pipes are just the conduit cemented into the bridge itself in order to protect the wires - that were cut off and left when the light was removed.
You can see this sort of shit anywhere there is decaying infrastructure, as it takes more money to properly clean up after something is removed.
What, you expect us to spend money to maintain our infrastructure? No way, we're already all tapped out with all the money we need to spend to defend against terrorism! Why, just this week there were two objects that kindof maybe sortof looked like bombs in Georgia! We can't afford to spend money on repairs or even proper dismantling when the fear^H^H^H^H threat of terrorism is hanging over our heads!
While I won't disagree that personal attacks cause issues and are ethically questionable, the counterargument (and the framework under which the anonymous doxxer is likely working under) is that awareness that the wider world might come crashing down on you will affect others' actions. So even if this isn't their district, it might well affect the actions of principals and other administrators in local districts, and in general humanity would be better off if there was a counterweight to the zero-tolerance bullshit, which was that admins would fear the general public's zero tolerance for the bullshit of zero-tolerance.
Now, to be clear, I don't actually think doxxing this principal will affect the actions of any other principals, since this kind of idiocy is already showing itself to be impervious to foresight, awareness, and sensibility.
Alternatively; "Here is how Google royally screwed up writing their OS so that updating even relatively minor parts requires a full OS upgrade while Apple and Microsoft seem to have figured out how patching works."
But that's precisely one of the reasons why they aren't bothering to patch this; in fully up-to-date Android releases, WebView has been replaced by a Blink component which Google can update via the Play Store, independently of OS updates. Many, many components of Android are like this these days (which is a problem for anyone not wanting Play Services, but that's another story). And actually Apple is a bad example, since they still for many OS components need to update the entire OS, it's just that unlike Google they've retained tight control and thus can push out those updates whenever they want.
Actually, Chromebooks do indeed have a shell and a default text editor. I think it's VIM? I forget now, and I left my Pixel at home and normally have it booted into a normal Linux desktop. The trick is just that you have to flip it into developer mode, which then gives a scary warning screen every time you start it up, and you're giving the kids a lot of leeway to muck up the system then I suppose, but on the other hand resetting it entirely is as simple as hitting spacebar and then y (if I'm remembering correctly) upon boot one time, and giving the kids who want to fiddle the ability to fiddle is probably the best education you can give many of them---figuring out how school computers and networks worked so I could install Doom and play it with my friends taught me more valuable lessons and skills for my current sysadmin job than any actual classes did!
The argument goes both ways -- I've spent hundred hours of my life learning POSIX, and if my boss wants me to run a POSIX program in Windows, I'm pretty much doomed.
Aha, but see, that's another reason to argue against proprietary systems and stacks. When things aren't proprietary, it's nearly inevitable that crazy, determined people will port it to everything you'd want to run the stack on; if your boss wants you to run a POSIX program on Windows, Cygwin certainly provides a pretty damn complete environment for doing so. Nearly every CLI programs I've ever wanted to use on Windows that I can on Linux is already in their repos, even, so the chances that you've written a POSIX-compliant application that can't run through Cygwin seems quite small.
And hell, a lot of the time these days things aren't necessarily so low-level, so stuff like MinGW are all that one needs to compile a Linux/BSD/whatever-aimed CLI program for Windows. And Free toolkits like Qt supply all you need to write and compile full GUI programs that'll run on POSIX-ish systems just as well as Windows, and hell, the few things you're for some reason doing low-level enough to require POSIX somehow can probably be #ifdef'd with what little WinAPI you know.
I'm not even kidding, that's literally what the systemd camp have proposed. (I actually think systemd is pretty snazzy on my smartphone, but I'm extremely skeptical of it as a sysadmin.)
Man, you were doing so well (not that I entirely agreed, but you were making well-argued logical counterpoints to GP's points) until the last sentence. I guess it's troll-v-troll here.
Actually, back in December 2012 Google tweaked things so that SafeSearch is, to a limited degree, always on; unless you explicitly search for "pornographic" materials they will generally filter out such results. As a Google rep put it in a statement to the press,
We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for -- but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them.
A lack of anonymity means people are held accountable, but that "accountability" is in the eye of the beholder, so it cuts both ways, and it definitely cuts against the person who isn't anonymous if others going after them are anonymous. The first thing that comes to my mind, then, is to have some degree of separation between anonymous/pseudonymous areas of communication and debate and "real name" ones. I'm not sure that's feasible (how to really draw such hard boundaries in such an interconnected age?) and I worry there'd be problematic results from such segregation. But it does seem to me like some of the more recent issues have been as bad as they've been due in no small part to a disparity of where the harassers and the targets are on the anonymous->pseudonymous->eponymous continuum.
TFA almost says as much, basically, with Google losing 2.1% share, Yahoo gaining 1.8%, Bing gaining 0.4% and all others combined losing 0.1%. It's a pretty dramatic win for Yahoo and considering it occurs right after Firefox switched, I think it's pretty clearly that.
I had to help the non-technical staff around my office because they were utterly confused when suddenly they started getting Yahoo results rather than Google, and sites they used to find so easily weren't showing up in their searches. I too had thought it was only going to be for new installs; was a bit of a rude awakening.
Google is actually trying to do exactly this with Google Now; predictively presenting you with information you'd otherwise be searching for is simple yet fairly innovative, arguably, and they're positioning it as the next advance in search. One might argue about the philosophy or practicality of that, but they are at least explicitly trying to completely remake what a search engine/page is.
It's certainly noticed that I go up to my local university campus in the afternoon on a specific day every week (although it doesn't know why...yet) and when I pop open the Search app it already shows at the top result, before I even have the chance to enter a search for bus and train schedules, a set of routes and times for transit up to campus. There as sense in which that's all just an obvious outgrowth of networked data, so perhaps calling it "extra-ordinarily innovative" is a stretch, but it's definitely something new for a search engine, and at least for me (again, your mileage may vary, especially vis-a-vis privacy concerns) is very convenient.
Not quite true, he was initially involved in the industry and became concerned, then deliberately took a job to give himself higher access so he could act on that concern.
Use big fans, and be picky about your parts. Power efficiency is key, you want something that generates very little waste heat and thus requires minimal cooling. Many good PSUs these days will only spin up the fans when on heavy load, which is a good compromise so that most of the time it's quiet but you don't have to worry about silently cruising to thermal extremes. Also be aware that the noise level isn't the entire story, you also want the noise to be as "white" as possible, because it's often the overtones and such whines that catch the ear. My primary computer acts mostly as a server but doubles as a second gaming PC when needed, has 5 drives and a powerful GPU and CPU in it . . . and because I was picky about the parts (among other things I mostly went with lower-RPM drives that are known to have few distinct tones to their operating noise) I have huge amounts of storage and a powerful gaming rig but it can stay on without much notice. Hell, my housemate fires up his PS3 or xbox360 and the noise level in the room is suddenly extremely high by comparison to how it was.
There's no other time and place I get to look down on cities from above, soaring past, or gaze out at a landscape composed of clouds. I wouldn't want to give that up. I can sit around with my laptop or smartphone or e-reader anytime; I can only see such a view during a plane flight, and I wouldn't want to give that up. If airlines started introducing such planes, i'd go rather far out of my way to avoid them.
Yup, their policies are considered left-wing, and entirely divorced from the hero-worship of the names, so much so that if you rattled off their policies you'd probably get the retort "well that kind of Anti-American nonsense wouldn't have flown back with Nixon or Reagan!"
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, AC here deserves upvotes. Sadly I have none. But parent deftly illustrates why the difficulty of getting valid scientific results in the social sciences in no way proves that it's categorically impossible; I suppose though some people would rather write things off as impossible when they can't get quick, easy results, which says far more about the people being so dismissive than the nature of such intellectual endeavours.
So your response to someone who you feel has personally attacked you is to claim that he's incompetent because only the incompetent would make personal attacks? I hate to break it to you, but that's a personal attack, and you've kindof argued yourself out of the argument here.
"You wound me, sir!" the AI cried,
"For student I am not.
In terms of prose and poetry
More than you've learned, have I forgot.
Yet you compare me to the fools
Whose minds through college rot?
The only insult worse would be
An editor of Slashdot."
Oh yeah, that's sure to solve his performance issues!
As Apple pulls further and further away from the once-cozy relationship they had with Google, what makes you think they'll fail to mirror Google's own business models and ventures? Then all that data they've been collecting will be, retroactively, just as loaded as what Google has on you.
Sounds like the problem is your company. Taking it out on random Slashdot commenters may give you a moment of catharsis, and there may be fancy, elaborate and kindof-barely-working solutions to your stated problem, but neither will solve the actual underlying problem.
Actually, a lot of decent federal programs and decisions have come from minority governments, and those are really only possible in a system with more than two parties. So I wouldn't actually say nothing changes in such an event.
Evolved since then? If anything we've devolved, and shall continue to do so. Fear-based policy and actions have a way of reinforcing themselves.
A single data point doesn't turn an irrational fear into a rational, respectable one. We can still demand more sense and an actual understanding of the risks from the authorities, instead of a fear or public panic based one. As many have pointed out, more people die on average per hour from vehicular accidents in America than have died from terrorism since 2001-09-11. I know we aren't ever going to get a proportional response to such things from authorities, media, or the public, but is being at most within a few orders of magnitude really too much to ask?
What, you expect us to spend money to maintain our infrastructure? No way, we're already all tapped out with all the money we need to spend to defend against terrorism! Why, just this week there were two objects that kindof maybe sortof looked like bombs in Georgia! We can't afford to spend money on repairs or even proper dismantling when the fear^H^H^H^H threat of terrorism is hanging over our heads!
While I won't disagree that personal attacks cause issues and are ethically questionable, the counterargument (and the framework under which the anonymous doxxer is likely working under) is that awareness that the wider world might come crashing down on you will affect others' actions. So even if this isn't their district, it might well affect the actions of principals and other administrators in local districts, and in general humanity would be better off if there was a counterweight to the zero-tolerance bullshit, which was that admins would fear the general public's zero tolerance for the bullshit of zero-tolerance.
Now, to be clear, I don't actually think doxxing this principal will affect the actions of any other principals, since this kind of idiocy is already showing itself to be impervious to foresight, awareness, and sensibility.
But that's precisely one of the reasons why they aren't bothering to patch this; in fully up-to-date Android releases, WebView has been replaced by a Blink component which Google can update via the Play Store, independently of OS updates. Many, many components of Android are like this these days (which is a problem for anyone not wanting Play Services, but that's another story). And actually Apple is a bad example, since they still for many OS components need to update the entire OS, it's just that unlike Google they've retained tight control and thus can push out those updates whenever they want.
Actually, Chromebooks do indeed have a shell and a default text editor. I think it's VIM? I forget now, and I left my Pixel at home and normally have it booted into a normal Linux desktop. The trick is just that you have to flip it into developer mode, which then gives a scary warning screen every time you start it up, and you're giving the kids a lot of leeway to muck up the system then I suppose, but on the other hand resetting it entirely is as simple as hitting spacebar and then y (if I'm remembering correctly) upon boot one time, and giving the kids who want to fiddle the ability to fiddle is probably the best education you can give many of them---figuring out how school computers and networks worked so I could install Doom and play it with my friends taught me more valuable lessons and skills for my current sysadmin job than any actual classes did!
Aha, but see, that's another reason to argue against proprietary systems and stacks. When things aren't proprietary, it's nearly inevitable that crazy, determined people will port it to everything you'd want to run the stack on; if your boss wants you to run a POSIX program on Windows, Cygwin certainly provides a pretty damn complete environment for doing so. Nearly every CLI programs I've ever wanted to use on Windows that I can on Linux is already in their repos, even, so the chances that you've written a POSIX-compliant application that can't run through Cygwin seems quite small.
And hell, a lot of the time these days things aren't necessarily so low-level, so stuff like MinGW are all that one needs to compile a Linux/BSD/whatever-aimed CLI program for Windows. And Free toolkits like Qt supply all you need to write and compile full GUI programs that'll run on POSIX-ish systems just as well as Windows, and hell, the few things you're for some reason doing low-level enough to require POSIX somehow can probably be #ifdef'd with what little WinAPI you know.
I'm not even kidding, that's literally what the systemd camp have proposed. (I actually think systemd is pretty snazzy on my smartphone, but I'm extremely skeptical of it as a sysadmin.)
Man, you were doing so well (not that I entirely agreed, but you were making well-argued logical counterpoints to GP's points) until the last sentence. I guess it's troll-v-troll here.
Turn off safe search?
Actually, back in December 2012 Google tweaked things so that SafeSearch is, to a limited degree, always on; unless you explicitly search for "pornographic" materials they will generally filter out such results. As a Google rep put it in a statement to the press,
A lack of anonymity means people are held accountable, but that "accountability" is in the eye of the beholder, so it cuts both ways, and it definitely cuts against the person who isn't anonymous if others going after them are anonymous. The first thing that comes to my mind, then, is to have some degree of separation between anonymous/pseudonymous areas of communication and debate and "real name" ones. I'm not sure that's feasible (how to really draw such hard boundaries in such an interconnected age?) and I worry there'd be problematic results from such segregation. But it does seem to me like some of the more recent issues have been as bad as they've been due in no small part to a disparity of where the harassers and the targets are on the anonymous->pseudonymous->eponymous continuum.
TFA almost says as much, basically, with Google losing 2.1% share, Yahoo gaining 1.8%, Bing gaining 0.4% and all others combined losing 0.1%. It's a pretty dramatic win for Yahoo and considering it occurs right after Firefox switched, I think it's pretty clearly that.
I had to help the non-technical staff around my office because they were utterly confused when suddenly they started getting Yahoo results rather than Google, and sites they used to find so easily weren't showing up in their searches. I too had thought it was only going to be for new installs; was a bit of a rude awakening.
It's certainly noticed that I go up to my local university campus in the afternoon on a specific day every week (although it doesn't know why...yet) and when I pop open the Search app it already shows at the top result, before I even have the chance to enter a search for bus and train schedules, a set of routes and times for transit up to campus. There as sense in which that's all just an obvious outgrowth of networked data, so perhaps calling it "extra-ordinarily innovative" is a stretch, but it's definitely something new for a search engine, and at least for me (again, your mileage may vary, especially vis-a-vis privacy concerns) is very convenient.
Not quite true, he was initially involved in the industry and became concerned, then deliberately took a job to give himself higher access so he could act on that concern.
Use big fans, and be picky about your parts. Power efficiency is key, you want something that generates very little waste heat and thus requires minimal cooling. Many good PSUs these days will only spin up the fans when on heavy load, which is a good compromise so that most of the time it's quiet but you don't have to worry about silently cruising to thermal extremes. Also be aware that the noise level isn't the entire story, you also want the noise to be as "white" as possible, because it's often the overtones and such whines that catch the ear. My primary computer acts mostly as a server but doubles as a second gaming PC when needed, has 5 drives and a powerful GPU and CPU in it . . . and because I was picky about the parts (among other things I mostly went with lower-RPM drives that are known to have few distinct tones to their operating noise) I have huge amounts of storage and a powerful gaming rig but it can stay on without much notice. Hell, my housemate fires up his PS3 or xbox360 and the noise level in the room is suddenly extremely high by comparison to how it was.
Edison wasn't really a scientist, he was more just a cutthroat businessman who jumped in at the tail end of the right discoveries.
There's no other time and place I get to look down on cities from above, soaring past, or gaze out at a landscape composed of clouds. I wouldn't want to give that up. I can sit around with my laptop or smartphone or e-reader anytime; I can only see such a view during a plane flight, and I wouldn't want to give that up. If airlines started introducing such planes, i'd go rather far out of my way to avoid them.
Yup, their policies are considered left-wing, and entirely divorced from the hero-worship of the names, so much so that if you rattled off their policies you'd probably get the retort "well that kind of Anti-American nonsense wouldn't have flown back with Nixon or Reagan!"